Experimental Philosophy

Actually, women are MORE likely to share their (mostly-male) professors' intuitions...

...at least for the 9 questions I studied for my 2013 paper, and for the 3 of those that Buckwaler and Stitch included in their widely-discussed paper on the subject. Plus: why has philosophy made so much less progress toward gender equality than the STEM disciplines have over the past two decades? I address these issues in my new article in Hypatia.

Chomsky and Moral Philosophy

Some experimental philosophers might be interested in "Chomsky and Moral Philosophy," a new paper I recently posted on SSRN.   It will appear in the second edition of The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (J. McGilvray, ed), which is due out later this year.  Here is the abstract:

Every great philosopher has important things to say about moral philosophy. Chomsky is no exception. Chomsky’s remarks on this topic, however, are not systematic. Instead, they consist mainly of brief and occasional asides. Although often provocative, they tend to come across as digressions from his central focus on linguistics and related disciplines, such as epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Perhaps as a result, moral philosophers have paid relatively little attention to Chomsky over the past sixty years.

This neglect is unfortunate. Chomsky’s insights into the nature and origin of human morality are fundamental and penetrating. They address deep philosophical problems that have shaped the aims of moral philosophy for centuries. They also reinforce many of the lessons Chomsky has taught about the nature and origins of human language. Elaborating upon these themes, this chapter begins by recounting two of Chomsky’s most extensive discussions of moral philosophy, each of which draws attention to the fact that, like linguistic knowledge, moral knowledge is an example of Plato’s problem: a complex mental competence characterized by a profound poverty of the stimulus. The chapter then places these remarks in a broader context by providing a brief discussion of mentalist, modular, and nativist theories of moral cognition from Plato to the present. Finally, the chapter responds to one prominent criticism of Chomsky’s naturalistic approach to moral philosophy, that of the late philosopher, Bernard Williams. I argue that Williams’ “Wittgensteinian” skepticism about moral rules is no more convincing than a similar skepticism about grammatical rules in the context of linguistic theory.

Negative Public Perceptions of Philosophical Research

Philosophy is not always perceived as well as philosophers would like. There are public discussions of whether philosophy has any value at all (The New York Times or The Chronicle of Higher Education). Members of our own draft manifestos criticizing philosophy's contributions to the academy (see Glymour’s “Manifesto” or Thagard’s “Eleven Dogmas of Analytic Philosophy”). Presidential candidates quip we need less philosophers.

In the latest incident, my personal childhood hero, Bill Nye got skeptical with BigThink about how far philosophical methods can take you in life, compared to say, scientific ones:

  

What contributes to negative opinions about philosophical research?

Knowledge of being manipulated does not affect moral responsibility. What?!

This past semester I was working with Fiery Cushman and an RA (Becca Ramos) on some studies on manipulation and moral responsibility and we ended up with some findings that I'm completely puzzled by, so I thought I'd see if you all have any ideas about them. (In case you want to read more on the background x-phi work on manipulation, you can find some of that: here, here, here, and here). 

One of the things I wanted to test was the intuitive idea that a critical aspect of being manipulated was not knowing that you were being manipulated. Intuitively, it seems like one is more responsible for doing an immoral action when you are aware that the environment has been set up so that you'll do that action. To test this basic idea, we designed a relatively simple study.

In one condition, the manipulated agent didn't know they were being manipulated:

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring country. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out.

The government knew their plan was working perfectly. Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

In the other condition, the agent did know that they were being manipulated (differences in italics):

In the 1950s, the government of a small Eastern European country plotted to secretly start a war, using industrial workers, and get revenge on a neighboring village. For the first part of their plan, the government intentionally destroyed farm machinery and set fire to several food stores on purpose. As a result, there was a serious lack of food in the country. Soon the people living in the city couldn't get enough food to feed themselves. The whole city shut down, crime skyrocketed and a small but violent uprising broke out. The government knew their plan was working perfectly.

Not long after, a couple of the industrial workers were informed by some government employees about the government’s plan to use the workers to attack the neighboring village.

Right at that time, a group of industrial workers heard on the government news channel that a neighboring village had a surplus of food. After hearing the news, the group of industrial workers raided the small village on the country's border, stealing food from the farmers and killing innocent people. The government had known this would happen all along and felt great about their successful plan.

We also included a condition in which the agent was not being manipulated (the government had no intention for the workers to attack the village). We used five different scenarios in total. Each participant read a single vignette and then was asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a statement of the form:

• The workers should be blamed for the damage to the neighboring village. 

Here's the pattern of results we got:

 

Two papers critical of order effect research at Synthese

Several experimental philosophers have found that philosophical intuitions of both professionals and laypeople are sensitive to the order in which the thought experiments they come from are presented. A nice summary of the latest results about this by Schwitzgebel & Cushman can be found here.

But now, not one but two new papers critical of this body of research are set to appear in Synthese (what did order effects ever do to you, Synthese?). One paper “Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism” by Zach Horne & Jonathan Livengood questions the assumption that order effects indicate philosophical intuitions are unreliable. Another paper, “How not to test for philosophical expertise” by Regina Rini claims to have identified a deep methodological problem invalidating most findings about order in philosophy!

Intuitive Resistance is the Mind-Killer

In a recent McSweeney’s article, Kyle York proposes some interesting takes on familiar ethical dilemmas with the potential to help reveal something truly fundamental about moral judgment. For instance, pull or no pull: 

“There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards four workers. You have the ability to pull off your head and turn it into a Chinese lantern. Your head floats into the sky until it takes the place of the sun. You look down upon the planet. It is as small as the eye of a moth. The moth flies away.”

Clearly a particular way of doing philosophy and moral psychology is being mocked. Philosophers and psychologists often rely on unrealistic thought experiments and experimental stimuli when conducting their research. To be fair, they do tend to avoid the surreal, but this does raise an interesting question. How worried should we be that deep down, we don’t actually believe the things we are asked to imagine as we make philosophically and psychologically relevant judgments about them?

Unifying Morality's Effect on Non-moral Cognition

At this point, it is pretty clear is that people’s moral judgments affect a surprisingly large number of their judgments that do not seem to be straightforwardly moral (e.g., belief, causation, doing vs. allowing, freedom, happiness, innateness, intentional action, knowledge, love, and so on) 

The sheer number of different judgments affected by morality provides some reason against continuing to search for separate explanations for each effect. Rather, it looks as though we should be searching for ways in which the various effects of morality may be unified. Of course, the sort of explanation that could unify these various effects would have to be so abstract that it could be playing a role in each of these diverse kinds of judgments.

In a new paper, we propose that the key to understanding how these effects can be unified is to begin thinking about the role of alternative possibilities. The basic idea is that our way of understanding many aspects of the world involves not only thinking about the things that actually happened but also considering other alternative ways that things could have happened but didn’t. Along these lines, our proposal has two key components:

(1) Morality affects which alternative possibilities are relevant.

(2) Each of the ordinary judgments affected by morality involve the representation of alternative possibilities in some way or another.

To test this unifying framework, we took the original materials from four previous studies which showed that agents who acted immorally (vs. neutrally) were more thought to have acted freely, caused the outcome that occurred, did something rather than allowed it to happen, and acted more intentionally. Using the original materials, we both replicated the four original effects, and also found that changes in the morality of the agent’s action impacted participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternative possibilities. Critically though, we also found that participants’ judgments of the relevance of alternatives mediated the effect of morality on judgments of freedom, causation, doing vs. allowing, and intentional action.

 

We then sought to further confirm this general framework by manipulating rather than measuring changes in the relevance of alternatives.

 

A Feminist Critique of Experimental Philosophy

In the first issue of the recently launched on-line open-access journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, there is a piece by Gaile Pohlhaus Jr. entitled, "Different Voices, Perfect Storms, and Asking Grandma What She Thinks: Situating Experimental Philosophy in Relation to Feminist Philosophy." It has made its way onto my never-ending reading list!

Here is the abstract:

At first glance it might appear that experimental philosophers and feminist philosophers would make good allies. Nonetheless, experimental philosophy has received criticism from feminist fronts, both for its methodology and for some of its guiding assumptions. Adding to this critical literature, I raise questions concerning the ways in which “differences” in intuitions are employed in experimental philosophy. Specifically, I distinguish between two ways in which differences in intuitions might play a role in philosophical practice, one which puts an end to philosophical conversation and the other which provides impetus for beginning one. Insofar as experimental philosophers are engaged in deploying “differences” in intuitions in the former rather than the latter sense, I argue that their approach is antithetical to feminist projects. Moreover, this is even (and perhaps especially) the case when experimental philosophers deploy “differences” in intuitions along lines of gender.

While you're at it, check out some of the other interesting articles in the volume as well. The more journals like this, the better.

Does X-Phi need to assume Centrality?

In my new paper in Philosophical Studies, I explore recent arguments by Cappelen, Williamson, and Deutsch that intuitions are not used as evidence in philosophy.  I argue that a rejection of 'Centrality' doesn't undermine the importance of experimental criticisms of philosophical method.

Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy

I am happy to announce a forthcoming new volume from the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy Series: A Companion to Experimental Philosophy. It is edited by Justin Sytsma and myself and features over forty chapters from leading philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists from several countries across three continents. These chapters detail the application of empirical methods to philosophical questions across major sub-disciplines including the philosophy of action, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of language, metaphysics, logic, and metaphilosophy.

The general introduction to the volume is available online here, offering a summary of the goals of the volume and a brief introduction to experimental philosophy for a general audience. The table of contents and list of contributors can be found below: